The NPR editor who wrote a scathing piece criticizing the public broadcaster resigned

The NPR editor who wrote a scathing piece criticizing the public broadcaster resigned

Uri Berliner, a senior National Public Radio editor who wrote scathing online essays accusing the public radio network of liberal bias, said Wednesday he had resigned from the station.

“I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” Berliner wrote in a resignation letter to NPR chief executive Katherine Maher, which he posted on his X account.

An NPR spokeswoman declined to comment.

Berliner’s resignation comes after he was suspended for five days without pay over his 3,500-word piece in the anti-establishment publication The Free Press. In the essay, Berliner claims NPR failed to properly cover Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia ahead of the 2016 election, the controversial Covid-19 lab leak theory and the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Berliner used his complaints about the way those individual stories were covered by his colleagues to draw the sweeping conclusion that NPR had lost its “diversity of viewpoints,” and started “telling listeners how to think.”

NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin quickly rejected Berliner’s characterization of the news outlet, telling staff in a memo that network management “strongly disagrees with Uri’s assessment of the quality of our journalism and the integrity of our newsroom processes.”

“We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is essential to telling the nuanced story of this country and our world,” he added.

Other NPR staffers publicly rejected Berliner’s assessment in social media posts.

In his resignation letter, Berliner said he did not support calls to cancel NPR and that he wanted to see the audio-focused channel thrive. But he said he can’t “work in a newsroom where I’m belittled by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the problems at NPR that I mentioned in my Free Press.”

Berliner was referring to several old tweets found in recent days by far-right activists in which Maher posted insults to Trump.

Isabel Lara, a spokeswoman for NPR, dismissed the attack, saying Maher “was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising his First Amendment right to express himself like any other American.”

A day after Berliner wrote his piece, the network found itself under siege as Donald Trump, Fox News and other right-wing figures lifted his piece to discredit NPR and call for it to defund it. Berliner’s allegations of network bias were considered popular news, with right-wing outlets and personalities describing Berliner as a “whistleblower”.